Julia Child would probably have blanched; Craig Claiborne would have given us only one star. Nevertheless, Earl and I prepared two culinary wonders for supper this evening.
We followed a recipe for noodle pudding from the Eisenhower Family cookbook with a recipe for crispy chicken from Food Fit for a King, a gastronomical homage to Elvis the Pelvis. I believe both recipes were originally prepared by the matriarchs of the clans.
The noodle pudding recipe challenged us from the start, since the way ingredients were described in the early nineteen hundreds is different from today. For instance, where does one find a pint of noodles? And how does one determine the size of a baking dish called a “noodle pan”? Is it square, rectangular, what?
But we forged on. Cooked the noodles, beat the eggs, melted the butter, measured the sugar, found the raisins to substitute for the nuts since Earl can’t eat nuts, and finally assembled the entire concoction for an hour in the oven at 350 degrees. If Ike could eat this, we could too.
In the meantime, we turned to Elvis’s mother for the chicken. I’d had the butcher cut the whole fryer into pieces that were of similar proportion, the better to cook them all at the same time. Earl whisked the dry pancake mix with the appropriate amount of water for the proscribed three minutes and then dunked the chicken pieces into it. They drained on a paper towel while I got the oil cooking in the electric skillet.
I should have been suspect of the pancake mix in the first place, but I chose to ignore the signs. I should have been suspicion of the dunked chicken pieces that looked like melted blobs as they waited for their hot oil bath. I should have known there was too much batter for the desired result. But I ignored my inner chef and proceeded to put the chicken into the bubbling oil.
Twenty minutes later, we did indeed have crispy chicken. Or at least we had crispy pancake batter that struggled to hug various chicken parts. Additionally, it smelled sweet instead of savory. But we told ourselves that Elvis loved this, so it must be good.
We took the pudding and chicken to the dinner table, said grace (I was praying that the food wouldn’t cause indigestion.), and began to eat. I won’t say we dug in, since we didn’t. Rather, we cut the chicken tentatively and watched the batter fall off. We ate our noodle pudding with various caveats. And, in the end, we decided that neither of these recipes is a keeper.
I wish I could introduce Ike and Elvis to my chocolate soup. Now that’s something else!
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